For my light reading lately, I’ve been enjoying a bit of vintage Noam Chomsky–What We Say Goes (a collection 2006 interviews).  In light of my recent post on Sarah Palin, I found this little nugget particularly intriguing:

“…about people here calling Bush names, that’s very constructive–for the radical right.  It is as if these people have been programmed by Karl Rove.  Rove wants to have the liberal critics ridicule Bush because he says ‘nucular’ and ‘misunderestimate’ and talks with a probably fake Texas accent.  In fact, my suspicion is he’s probably been trained to make grammatical errors–he didn’t talk like that at Yale–so he’ll be ridiculed by liberals, and then he can say, ‘See, those elite liberals who run the world and are sitting around drinking French wine and eating quiche don’t understand us ordinary guys.’  Regular guys like the guy working on the assembly line and George Bush, who is going back to his ranch to cut brush.  That’s all part of the imagery.”